Introduction This article provides a quick way to backup the most common things in a typical web hosting scenario: website files and database data. We will setup a full daily backup of a website folder and a copying of this data to a remote server (this can also work for another VPS). We will also set up a rsync example to just copy the incremental changes. Finally, we'll set up backup of a MySQL database. The procedures described use a few simple Bash commands, rsync and cron to schedule backups. For example data, we can install Wordpress as per this tutorial. It will place Wordpress in /var/www/wordpress directory and a MySQL databasewordpress and we now want to take a backup of all the data. DigitalOcean provides <ahref="https: www.digitalocean.com="" community="" articles="" digitalocean-backups-and-snapshots-explained"="">Snapshots and Backups, to handle backups and snapshots very well. There are also excellent backup-as-a-service solutions that work with the minimum configuration. But sometimes we want to use another backup server or perhaps an inhouse server, and we want a quick way to pull the data from webhost back to our server. In that case, these tips can help. There are two ways to do backup: incremental and full backups. A full backup copies all the data, while the snapshot only handles the changes since the last update. Full Backup Full backup typically does the following: Make an archive of all the files in a folder Copy the resulting archive to a remote server. As noted, our data will reside in /var/www/wordpress directory. We will designate a backup folder location. mkdir -p /backup/wordpress The…

Introduction Rsync, which stands for "remote sync", is a remote and local file synchronization tool. It uses an algorithm that minimizes the amount of data copied by only moving the portions of files that have changed. In this guide, we will cover the basic usage of this powerful utility. We will be using an Ubuntu 12.04 VPS in the examples, but you can use any modern Linux distribution to follow along. What Is Rsync? Rsync is a very flexible network-enabled syncing tool. It can also refer to the network protocol developed to utilize this tool. When we reference rsync in this guide, we are mainly referring to the utility, and not the protocol. Due to its ubiquity on Linux and Unix-like systems and its popularity as a tool for system scripts, it is included on most Linux distributions by default. Basic Syntax The basic syntax of rsync is very straight forward, and operates in a way that is similar to ssh, scp, and cp. We will create two test directories and some test files with the following commands: cd ~ mkdir dir1 mkdir dir2 touch dir1/file{1..100} We now have a directory called dir1 with 100 empty files in it. ls dir1 file1 file18 file27 file36 file45 file54 file63 file72 file81 file90 file10 file19 file28 file37 file46 file55 file64 file73 file82 file91 file100 file2 file29 file38 file47 file56 file65 file74 file83 file92 file11 file20 file3 file39 file48 file57 file66 file75 file84 file93 file12 file21 file30 file4 file49 file58 file67 file76 file85 file94 file13 file22 file31 file40 file5 file59 file68 file77 file86…